Gates to Services: Shut Up and Back Obama’s Budget Cuts

They told me that if I voted for McCain, political appointees would ruthlessly strong-arm career government employees, and force them to stay silent when their views deviated from the company line. And they were right!

[Gates] said he tried to give the services the “maximum possible opportunity” to share their views during the internal budget negotiations.

“The thing that is important is to reinforce within the building, in terms of dealing with the Hill, that there is a chain of command,” he said. “Once the decision is made, and particularly once the president signs off on the budget, then there needs to be discipline about people not conducting guerilla warfare against decisions the president has made.”

Gates said he briefed President Obama on his recommendations last week, but the White House has not yet formally signed off on his budget proposal.

But Gates, who required everyone involved in the budget negotiations to sign a non-disclosure form barring them from discussing the deliberations, said he has been “astonished by the discipline showed in this process” over the last three months.

During the war in Iraq, the Left made a cottage industry out of promoting anyone loosely connected with the Pentagon who might ever had had a qualm about the direction the Pentagon was taking. I can only hope they’ll be equally interested in this attempt to censor the brave public servants who might be willing to stand up against the President’s attempt to force adherence to the idea of the ‘unitary executive.’ After all, if career military officers happen to think the President is pursuing a course that recklessly endangers America and its interests, they want those brave souls to speak up about it, right?

I’ll be watching Kos, HuffPo and the other leading liberal sites to see how long it takes them to speak up against the Obama administration’s effort to silence internal critics – after all, there’s little the Left loves better than whistleblowers speaking truth to power, is there?